It’s no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it’s still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What’s more, I don’t think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!
Current redditors are a virus. They are nothing like the people who built the site a decade ago. We don’t need them here
Lmao elitism like this will just turn Lemmy into a radioactive, insular circlejerk cesspool
If you want the reddit experience you can just stay there. It’s still available and active. You sound like the kind of people that move across country because you want change then complain the new state isn’t the same as your old home full of those problems that made you move.
And you sound like a republican telling refugees to go back to their home country
People are leaving Reddit out of conscience and are looking for a more free place to share opinions, which this structurally is.
If you don’t like it, start your own instance or join r/conservative
I messaged r/comicbooks mods after they were briefly banned by reddit offering them a place on my instance if they ever wanted to shift their community away from reddit. They threatened to permanently ban me for spam LMAO
I almost agree with this. I think that the problem aren’t the individuals themselves, but how that environment conditioned them to behave like morons. And I also think that, as long as they change their behaviour when arriving, they could be useful to bring more content quantity to Lemmy.
I’ve been a reddit user for at least 15 years. I’ve been a Lemmy user for a few months. Lemmy has a long way to go before it’s a “viable Reddit alternative”. Right now it’s barely usable.
Any topics outside of memes, IT and politics are nearly non-existent.
This place is heavily skewed towards a specific niche of mostly males that are chronically online
Isn‘t the approach from OP tackling exactly that problem? Or do you think it will be too much for switchers to set up a community here?
You cannot block an instance, there are no multireddits, Sync is still in beta, the main instance is down half of the time, searching for contents is difficult, the discovery of new content is drowned among duplicates of existing communities.
I’m a heavy Lemmy poster, but all of these points should be addressed for Lemmy to become mainstream
For me, it needs features from RES, Toolbox, highlight new comments, etc.
Unless I’m mistaken, highlighting new comments was a reddit gold feature, not RES.
Stop trying to turn this place into R. We left because it was shit. If you don’t like this place, go somewhere else.
Sounds like you’re blaming the users for the CEO being a cunt
Also sounds like you don’t understand the structural implications of Lemmy being a federated social network
Also sounds like you’re intolerant of other’s opinions and think they should leave
Sounds like you’re a conservative
Are we blaming the people and communities of Reddit or the actions of the IPO-minded business?
Inb4 “yes”.
The IPO-minded business was unwilling to curtail and curate the userbase as every user was the equivalent to potential profit. There’s many many many people from Reddit who should not find a place online to call home. They can stay with the capitalists until the capital runs dry.
Are we blaming the people and communities of Reddit or the actions of the IPO-minded business?
It depends on the person, I think. I left Reddit because I was outright disgusted with its idiotic userbase, but plenty people are here because they know that the vulture capital will wreck that place.
And at the end of the day, we might as well ask if both aren’t intrinsically tied - Reddit’s userbase being so awful because of the business behind it. @z00s@lemmy.world mentioned the “shitlord mods”, most of the time the admins behave in a rather similar fashion.
Not this again…
Lemmy isn’t everyones’ cup of tea. Reddit, despite the API shenanigans, still does what people want.
People are not moving here from Reddit if they haven’t already. They’d sooner go to Discord. Less cognitive load, and their subs already have servers set up. Lemmy has a 5 communities different servers for each sub and most will be inactive, so it’s already a losing battle.
Make Lemmy it’s own thing, rather than aspiring to be the 2nd head of the Hydra. Organic growth is good, sustainable. Boom and bust wholesale migrations look like failed hostile takeovers.
People are not moving here from Reddit if they haven’t already.
I think you’re underestimating Reddit’s ability to continue degrading the Reddit experience with their ham-fisted attempts to maximize revenue.
I don’t disagree with that. Reddit will keep burning bridges with it’s oldest users. old.reddit will be the next on the chopping block and that will be the death knell for desktop Reddit for a sizable number of people.
But I think you’re underestimating the average modern Redditor’s reluctance to jump ship. 3rd party apps were not even something they knew existed. Most never used reddit before the redesign. They already used the app. You cant miss what you never had.
I have looked at old.reddit.com recently and I loved it. Though I had never used it in past.
Now I can understand why people like it so much.
I agree on all points. But I‘d say both things can be true at the same time.
Maximize attention brought to lemmy as an alternative so that the last salvageable soul on reddit gets the message while not shooting for copying reddit (like actual copying of posts for example and recreating every sub etc).
While I am very much in agreement with your arguments, I feel like your rhetoric is a little black and white albeit entertaining. Yes, there will be people going to discord because mental load, yes there will be people unwilling but some might still not have gotten the message.
So I say keep telling them but don’t try to „sell it“ if that makes sense.
Edit: fixed half finished sentence
I think the problem was Lemmy didn’t have the apps in place ready to take advantage of reddits API deadline. Loads of people come to Lemmy but it wasn’t up to scratch yet. So they went back to what they already knew.
Now big apps like sync are on board. If they give lemmy another go I reckon they will stay this time.
They open Sync, they they see they can’t post, they leave again.
I know post is coming in the next hours, but it’s the same for multireddits, instance blocking, account migration, etc.
This was basically me. Looked around for an app I liked, couldn’t find one for Lemmy but there was an okay-ish open source one for reddit. Used that for awhile but kept an eye on Lemmy.
My only issue now is that i want to ignore an couple instances (lemmynsfw, and the like) but I can’t… Can I? There isn’t enough content in “subscribed new” and find I’m going to “all new” but there’s too much NSFW… Maybe I’m on here too much.
I had a similar experience.
I’m using “Connect.” For every post I see, there’s both a “block this community” and “block this instance” option. After I started making use of these, my feed (while still limited) became much more palatable. Presumably other apps have similar functionality, but I cannot comment definitively.
I think you’re grossly overestimating the ability of FOSS to reach “regular” people. 99.9% of Redditors haven’t even heard of Lemmy. There are assuredly very many people using Reddit who would be very happy to switch to something better.
You’re not wrong with any of your points, I’m just saying there’s no reason to discourage a “get the word out” campaign. People can make their own choices, but only after they know what the options are.
As someone who recently was wondering what my alternatives to Reddit were, then stumbling here recently, I think what we need is a good personality to do a 3 minute YouTube tutorial that gets out on Reddit.
I still don’t fully understand the difference between the two, but what I do know is encouraging. But it took effort to discover that difference. Reddit is apathetic. A three minute video may be short enough to get people to understand.
Just needs to show what it looks like (similar to Reddit with sync and I’m sure others), then a brief description of how it differs under the hood, and then how to set up an account and subscribe to a community.
Have a look at this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/1507unf/post_why_dont_reopen_here_completely/
People were being told to move to Lemmy, but they fiercely refused, sometimes being utterly agressive.
And this is a Unixporn community, which is supposed to be aware of FOSS.
I think a more appropriate approach is just to mention lemmy to your circles of friends and try to get any redditors you personally know to give lemmy a try, at least get the app installed so they can browse both reddit and lemmy. Lemmy won’t be able to handle millions upon millions of new people, especially ones with no guidance, but communities aren’t built overnight and we should do our best to get those who could use lemmy to use lemmy, one at a time. We shouldn’t be trying to overthrow reddit, just give a viable alternative to those willing to try one. It’s the more organic approach.
I’m really not interested in this being a Reddit clone. Several of the subreddits I wanted to be rid of have already popped up, here, while the better side of Reddit isn’t really showing up, especially since Reddit re-opened and purged pesky mods so they could all get back to their scrolling.
Oh, yes lawd, that’s what I need. I need fucking antiwork to shit up the place with their misery vibe while 196 goes skipping back to Reddit and takes all the fun times with her. Sign me up.
I wanted to become involved with a completely different community, with different mores, a different feel, and its own vibe. Fuck Reddit. I left that place looong before the blackout thing, I got tired of its toxic culture that sucked the life out of me after a few minutes.
Now that’s starting to leak into Lemmy and I’m frankly eyeing the door.
If you liked Reddit, you need to go back there. I didn’t like Reddit. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want there to come here, either.
The joy of the Fediverse is that growth is nice but we don’t NEED growth. A lot of you can’t understand that. You can’t understand that the platform will NOT fail if it doesn’t get the kind of exponential, runaway growth that you associate with social media success. We do not actually need to hit TikTok numbers, ever. We need steady, slow user growth from people wanting something different, that’s what. If the Fediverse becomes the Linux of social media, fine.
So no. No to this idea. Let Reddit stay on Reddit, thank you.
Disagree with this take in general (growth is worthwhile if only to shift communications platforms in general to open and federated protocols) but I don’t think Lemmy is quite where we need it to be in order to sustain a migration. Finding a good instance is still tough, the idea of federation isn’t easy to grasp for a new user yet, and the UX is still hammering out bugs. (Big thanks to all the devs that already work on Lemmy and all those that shifted over with the Reddit exodus for driving it to new heights so rapidly.)
An ideal migration from my perspective would have them find instances that cater to their interests and views and would allow easy defederation if undesired. Also, more control for the end user in what communities they see on their feeds when going through discovery (new/hot/etc feeds).
With better user controls for self moderation and better distribution of users across multiple instances I think we can have our cake and eat it too: growth towards a free world of communications without bogging us down by dealing with the folks/attitudes we find repugnant.
I agree and disagree.
If it’s one or the other I’d also say we don’t need growth. But truth is: We have to be of a certain size so that talking about niche topics works. Currently there are communities that just don’t work because it’s just one person or a very few active people and it’s not enough for a conversation. It’s just, we need to grow in a healthy way. In certain places and we need to attract just the right people.
But altogether it’s what i’ve been saying about free software and/or platforms for years now. We don’t need to compare ourselves to something else, we don’t need to clone something else… This is our little cozy place. If i wanted everything to be like on reddit, I’d just go there and not spend my time here and complain.
One thing I disagree is that Lemmy is becoming like Reddit. I met a few nice people here. And it did and still does feel different. And maybe this place is big enough to be a home for all of us. From people who are ‘toxic’ in other people’s eyes to people that just want to talk about 80s computers. I think we need a few things to change and a technical solution to the problem so that people can get along. We already have federation and some servers de-federating others because of fundamental disagreements. I think moderation has to be enhanced. And we need to stop showing the ‘ALL’ feed per default. That just contains silly memes or lots of low quality content. That’d be a good start.
Tbh when I’m reading comments on Lemmy I’m seeing way more negativity than what was in Reddit discussions… this comment is really an example of that too. It was a nightmare reading discussion here when Sync was released. I’m trying to like this place but I find the community here to be a bit exhausting, it seems if you don’t conform to certain ideas/opinions you’re just going to get torn apart in the discussion. Not to mention I’m seeing a lot more politically right leaning attitudes around here than I’m used to (which doesn’t HAVE to be a bad thing but unfortunately usually ends up being so).
Not saying all of Lemmy is like this, but from what I see get voted to the top of discussions more often than not, it seems to be the vibe here. Reddit had it’s issues of course but at least it still seemed to carry a lighthearted attitude in the community. I hope more people come here still and the community vibe changes.
